Just tell our TDs that Enoch Crashed the Car

When the Irish State wants compliance, it knows how ruthless it can be. But for gurriers who rob cars and put it on TikTok? It does not enforce compliance because it does not want to.

The knee-jerk reaction is a vital tool of the Irish politician. It demonstrates exactly what the name suggests: That the basic political reflexes are working, even if nothing else is. That the dear leader has heard the siren cry of his people, and moved swiftly to assuage their concerns. Irish governance is essentially built around the knee-jerk reaction.

Yesterday’s knee-jerk reaction to the great gurrier crisis of August 2026 was, by any measure, classic stuff.

First, the statements were issued. A very stern looking Jim O’Callaghan was replayed, every hour on the hour on Sky News, telling the gurriers that this is the end of the line for them, and that he simply couldn’t understand their gurrier-ness. If you closed your eyes and forgot for a moment everything you have ever known about Ireland, you might even think something of substance was about to be done.

Of course, nothing is.

Consider the Government’s great announcement: It will, it declared, create a new criminal offence of driving the wrong way down the motorway. The thing that was already illegal will now be doubly illegal. And this new law will be enforced just as completely and thoroughly as the existing laws are, which is to say that if the police spot you driving the wrong way down the motorway, they will still not be empowered to intervene.

This is classic Irish do-somethingism. They know it is for show, you know it is for show, and they know that you know, and so on. But it provides the appearance of action, which is all that it is designed to do, while the Government works out a way to transfer blame to some third party.

And in that cause, the machinery of official Ireland is churning according to the well-worn script.

The usual keening is already underway, and by that I do not mean the funerals. I mean instead the media who are already in their own way transferring blame from the perpetrators to the social media companies. The inference, if not the direct argument, is essentially that our five dead gangbangers were innocent little chaps until TikTok made them do it.

Here’s the thing: If these kids were able to post these videos online, and get thousands of views and hup-ya-boy-ya’s from fellow knobheads, then the Gardai were as capable of viewing those videos and acting upon them as anyone else. The story here is not that the great criminal masterminds were posting their videos because of TikTok – it is that Ireland is now such a paradise for your local scrote that he feels perfectly safe posting evidence of his crimes on the internet knowing that the cops will – as Sarah says – do nuttin’.

But anyway, back to our beloved politicians.

There are a few things here that must be said.

First, Minister O’Callaghan, this is your Ireland. This is the country your laws and your policies have created. How many millions of euros have you spent, for example, promoting and defending Traveller “culture” when most of us experience that culture as some blend of crime, rudeness, thuggery, and dependence? Where does that money come from? The rest of us, is the answer, including presumably the family now fighting for a life that – as Laura noted this morning – will never be the same again.

Where is the ownership? Where is the admission or the acknowledgment that these children – the oldest was 18 – grew up in a society entirely built by modern Fianna Fáil and Fine Gael. The oldest dead crook was born in 2008, under the glorious reign of Brian Cowen. He was melded into what he was in the country built by Enda Kenny, Leo Varadkar, Micheál Martin, and Simon Harris. At 18, this is what the country taught him he could do.

Meanwhile, Enoch Burke might not be blameless, but he’s spent more time in a jail than any one of these thugs was ever likely to. That, Minister, is on YOU.

When the Irish state wants to force you to comply, it has all the tools it needs. It can be ruthless. Where is that ruthlessness with the gurriers? Why is it reserved for the slightly batty schoolteacher?

Second, what is actually going to change?

Nothing, is the answer. You know it, dear reader, and I do. And the reason nothing will change is precisely because, as above, changing something would require an admission that what had gone before was wrong. An admission that these children of progressive Ireland are products of progressive Ireland.

That cannot happen.

So we get what we always get: The statements and the finger wagging and the declarations that something must change, while an alternative villain – this time TikTok – is quietly advanced with the connivance of Ireland’s useless media who can, they imagine, use this crisis to extort more taxpayer money for fact-checking and combatting fake news.

As readers of my work over the years will know, I rarely get very angry, and try to view this country as the black comedy show that it has been for many years. But this is different. The reaction here should be different.

And so far, it’s not at all.

One last thing, on how the reaction should be different: A special word here is needed for the Roman Catholic Church and its tolerance for this culture. Let me tell you what should happen, but will not:

These dead thugs, who attacked – accident is not an appropriate word – three sisters and a child with their vehicle, should not be given Catholic funerals, or at least not the funerals we have come to expect from that section of society. A Catholic Priest who permits the usual fuckery (that’s the only word that applies) where enormous wreaths are draped across horse-drawn coffins, and weapons and knives are brought forward as “offerings” and the church is turned into a scene from The Godfather Part 3, should be turfed out of his job. Daub the coffins with holy water if you must, and toss them in the ground. Sacraments may be necessary, but nothing else is. These five souls died doing something evil. If the Church cannot make a stand on that, what is it for?

JMG